348 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM the market for tourist guide services produced by resolution PG 163862/201938, approved by the City Council of Bologna in the session of 8 April 2019. The Authority found that, by providing discounted rates for tourist buses that purchase the entrance ticket to the ZTL (limited traffic area) in Bologna through tourist guides with the required qualification in the Emilia Romagna Region, such resolution gives an unjustified competitive benefit to local guides, compared to guides who qualified in other Italian regions or provinces. This way, the tour operators who organise tourist trips to Bologna could be led to prefer local guides’ services in order to benefit from these discounts. According to ICA, this preferential treatment for licensed tourist guides in the Emilia Romagna Region is not justified by any particular needs to protect the community’s interests. Firstly, it emerged that the underlying motivation for the approval of such concession was the protection of category interests (“in order to protect a category of workers who actively contribute to the tourist promotion of the City”). Secondly, changing the tariffs in question does not appear to be a necessary and proportionate tool to achieve the subsequent objective invoked in support of the concession, namely the “need to prevent the illegal exercise of the tourist guide profession”. In fact, this objective is only indirectly connected with the proposed instrument and is, in any case, achievable throughmeasures that are less restrictive of competition, for example, more accurate controls of the qualifications of tourist guides operating in the metropolitan area of Bologna, regardless of the area from which they might originate. 3.8. In conclusion, taking into consideration the analysis above, it is clear that the advocacy activity carried out by the Authority is an important tool to protect competition, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, it corrects the individual aspects of regional legislative disciplines, that might circumventing the principles of protection of competition guaranteed by national and EU law. Secondly, it helps to standardise – through the protection of competition – the tourism discipline. b) ICA Investigation: Booking and Expedia cases 3.9. The second type of tool through which the Authority protects competition, also applicable to the tourism sector, includes ascertaining the violation of the 38 Concerning “Sustainable mobility measures: tariff concessions for access to the limited traffic area (ZTL) of tourist buses with a licensed tourist guide pursuant to LR 4/2000”, which is to say “with a guide qualified in the Emilia Romagna Region”.
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